The coffin of slain Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba returned to his home on Wednesday for an emotionally charged tour and burial, more than six decades after his assassination.
A plane took Lumumba’s mortal remains—a tooth that ex-colonial power Belgium handed over to his family on Monday—from Brussels to Kinshasa for a nine-day trip around the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The coffin and an accompanying delegation then flew to the central province of Sankuru, where the country’s first post-independence leader was born in the village of Onalua in 1925.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo apologised again for his country’s “moral responsibility” in Lumumba’s death.
Two weeks before, Belgium’s King Philippe on his first trip to the DRC reiterated his “deepest regrets for the wounds” inflicted by Belgian colonial rule.
Historians say millions of people were killed, mutilated, or died of disease as they were forced to collect rubber under Belgian rule.
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